Over the last year, the number of officially unemployed has risen by 500,000, while the number of people outside the labor force — neither working nor looking for a job — has risen by 1.3 million.
Employment has risen by 100,000, but even that comes with a caveat: there are also 600,000 more people who are working part time because they could not find full-time work, according to the Labor Department.
“The decline in the unemployment rate,” said Joshua Shapiro, an economist at MFR, a research firm in New York, “should not be viewed as good news.”
Meanwhile, Bush's economic team continues to promote the idea that what you don't know doesn't exist.
At the White House on Friday, Edward P. Lazear, the chairman of Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, parried reporters’ questions about whether he now thought the economy would slip into a recession.
Instead, he said, “I’m still not saying that there is a recession.”
End to the Good Times (Such as They Were)
By DAVID LEONHARDT
If history is a reliable guide, the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable.
The dismal jobs report released Friday showed overall employment to be lower than it was three months ago. Every time such a slump has occurred since the early 1970s, a recession has followed — or already been under way.
And if the good times have really ended, they were never that good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.
For months, policy makers and Wall Street economists have been predicting, and hoping, that the aggressive series of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve would keep the economy growing, despite the housing bust. But the possibility seemed to diminish almost by the hour on Friday.
